<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>Go Easy On Me by switchingfoot</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27561712">Go Easy On Me</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/switchingfoot/pseuds/switchingfoot'>switchingfoot</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Band of Brothers (TV 2001)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>F/M</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2011-09-08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2011-09-08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 03:34:02</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>7</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>11,302</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27561712</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/switchingfoot/pseuds/switchingfoot</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>A girl from Mississippi with a head for logistics trying not to play favorites. A medic from Louisiana who obviously is. And a war that could just as easily tear them apart, as it could bring them together.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Eugene Roe/Original Female Character(s)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Emilie</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Part of my effort to move old ff.net/livejournal stories to this account. I'm less satisfied with this story at the end of the day (the worst bit being that she doesn't have any sort of definitive role?), but I am still somewhat fond of Em and Babe.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“Can I just-“</p><p>“No,” he returns before she even has the chance to finish asking, which she finds somewhat rude and rather unfair of him. He was irritated because somewhere, somewhere that was too deeply hidden away, somewhere that he’d never acknowledge, he was terrified and she was asking to check his supplies for the third time in the past twenty minutes.</p><p>But then, she was terrified, too.</p><p>“Doc, being thorough ‘s what got me this job, you know,” she states, hands on her hips, a pencil laced through the fingers of her right hand and a collection of papers hanging from her left. As he turns back around to look at her fully she thinks that maybe she’d have to get used to checking less than three times, but it was just that she’d always had the time to check at least that many and usually more, and change was difficult and also, somewhere, in the pit of her stomach she feels a little lurch when their eyes finally lock and she blames it on the impending terror but later, much later, thinks that maybe that wasn’t it at all.</p><p>“Fine, Ramos,” he grumbles, his accent thick to further show his agitation. “One more time.” </p><p>She tries to show her appreciation in his relenting but his eyes have closed as he breathes in to exhale a sigh, so instead she takes to running through her list again, this time forcing her nimble and shaking fingers to do all the work so as not to upset him any further. And when she finishes, finally satisfied and ready to move onto preparing herself, he sighs again, dragging her attention back to his paint stained face, that mirrors hers and everyone’s around them and she wonders, for a moment, if anyone would recognize their brothers and their sons or if they could even see past the dirt and the ink and, if they could, would they still be able to when this was over.</p><p>And likely, that was the last time she’d ever think that far into the future, because, honestly, it was already a wonder that she was alive in the first place, and she knew it wouldn’t be much longer before it was a bona fide miracle. So she takes her tags in her hand to rub together, to hear the sound of metal on metal, the only clear proof that you were still alive. Because if that sound was gone then you were probably dead or you were already lost.</p><p>And before she turns to leave she squats back down next to the medic and hands him an unopened pack of cigarettes. He looks at her with a question written in his eyes, not the least of which being that she was technically an officer and he was just a medic and sometimes she was the most curious thing any of the boys had ever seen but she gives him a smile in response and she stands and all he sees, for a moment, are her boots. Three sizes too small.</p><p>“Ma’am,” he starts, beginning to stand, though she’s already turned and is headed for another plane and another pile of soldiers. She pauses and tilts her head, loose strands of hair whipping about for a moment, reveling in the last minutes of their freedom before they’re trapped beneath a standard issue helmet for the majority of the next years of their lives, and he thinks, vaguely, that he might always have that imagine in his mind, of the girl with the fly away hair on the brink of disaster, standing at the edge of a canyon with a look that could only be described as happiness though it’s ridden through with bullets of sadness and melancholy and perhaps a kind of nostalgia. </p><p>“Tell me after we’ve landed, hm?” She half asks and half states, but doesn’t wait for an answer, and he sinks back to the ground watching her retreat, praying to God that he’d survive if only so he could apologize.</p><p>--</p><p>“Speirs, you smoke more than a chimney,” she coughs as he exhales, letting out the last bit of his last cigarette.</p><p>“You got any more or not, Ramos?” He asks, though he’s started moving again and isn’t even looking at her. She shakes her head slightly anyway, coming to the conclusion that she couldn’t simultaneously be anymore lucky and unlucky at the same time as to have landed near him.</p><p>Granted, she probably wasn’t going to forgive him any time soon for greeting her with an M-1.</p><p>“Gave my pack to Doc Roe,” she murmurs, and she doesn’t have to see his face to know that he’s wondering just what she’s good for if she doesn’t not only not have a weapon, but also doesn’t have a pack of smokes.</p><p>“You shouldn’t play favorites, Em,” he drops his voice, and she hears him saying that she shouldn’t even be here though he doesn’t say it out loud. But he doesn’t need to, because she can read any of the officers in the 506 without even trying. After all, that was her job.</p><p>“Maybe I’m not playing, Ron,” she bites back, suddenly wishing very much that she’d landed with someone else. Anyone else.</p><p>“That’s right,” he turns to look at her and she’s rather taken aback by the look in his eyes, like she can’t breathe and he’s aware of it and maybe she can’t read him as well as she thought but maybe she reads him too well because she already knows what he’s going to say. “You’ve already picked Easy.”</p><p>She wants to say that she didn’t pick, because she didn’t, she got assigned there. But she realizes that if she could have picked she wouldn’t have picked any different and wasn’t that exactly what he was saying anyway? </p><p>Twenty minutes later, when they’ve wandered their way to Battalion CP and they’ve picked up more lost sheep along the way, she murmurs something about being ready for the fun to begin but she really wants to say something about how she hoped he didn’t die but in a more normal and not so pessimistic way but he looks at her and gives her a half smile when she actually turns to face him and she thinks that maybe he understood what she wasn’t saying. So she scans the list in her mind and sets to checking off the names.</p><p>--</p><p>It isn’t until sometime later, much later, after she’s felt her heart and her stomach doing somersaults and lurches at every face that shows up and everyone that doesn’t, and they’ve finally got a minute to rest and the world isn’t trying to run away from them quite so fast anymore, that she stumbles upon him. And she watches him trying to wash his hands for a moment before taking his hands into hers, without warning or preamble, and continues for him. He wants to say so many things, and he wants to make her a little less of an enigma, and he wants, inexplicably, to pull her close to him because her eyes have a sort of permanent gloss to them already, but he doesn’t know how to do any of those things, and he feels like he’s suffocating on all of his words, which are tangled and jumbled and he doesn’t think he could form a coherent sentence even if he tried. She stops him from having to, though, cutting him off after he manages a ‘Ma’am.’</p><p>“Didn’t I tell you that you didn’t have to call me that?” She whispers, not looking up at him, but running her fingers along his hands one last time before pulling away. She had told him. Told him that he was a different standard altogether, and, as far as she was concerned, outranked her and everyone else because he was Doc Roe and if anyone was going to see them through this war it was him. But he didn’t like to think about that, because all he could remember, vibrantly as though it were only minutes ago, was the way he felt weightless when she’d put herself directly in his path like he’d just made a jump and the ground wasn’t coming up fast enough and he’d left his stomach back on the plane. And he didn’t know what that meant. So instead he calls her out.</p><p>“How long’ve you been limping?” he asks, because that’s something he knows, something he can do. She shakes her head and says that it’s nothing, so he says her name, his accent caressing it, like he was meant to say it, and she feels like crying and she’s not sure why.</p><p>“Really, Gene, it’s nothing,” she says instead, swallowing the uncomfortable lump in her throat back down. And when he’s about to start again, she sighs, “it’s just flaring up again is all, nothing I can’t handle. Probably should’ve listened to Nix when he told me to join the party instead of running up that damn mountain again.”</p><p>“Let me look,” he says, but it’s more of a question and she gives him a look but relents anyway, though it doesn’t take long for him to discover there’s nothing for him to do. She couldn’t very well keep off her feet. So he looks back up at her, but she won’t look back because she’d involuntarily gasped when his fingers had touched her exposed ankle and she wasn’t as good at gauging the men because she hadn’t been studying them quite so closely for weeks on end, which makes it all that much more of a relief when Nixon finds them because she knows, immediately, what he’s there for.</p><p>“Ramos,” he starts, but stops when he sees Roe at her feet.</p><p>“Where to, Nix?” She asks, drawing his attention back to her even as Gene stands back up. He glances back and forth between her face, and the good medic, and her fingers swiftly pulling at the laces on her boot. </p><p>“Colonel Sink and Major Strayer would be nice,” he states and she nods her head, because she wouldn’t have suspected anyone else. He finds the papers in his coat, while she looks back at Roe, who’s collected his helmet and hers and is offering it to her and she offers a half smile back, settling it on her head.</p><p>“Try to keep off that ankle,” he states, though everyone present knows that won’t happen. Still, she thinks, it’s nice that he tells her, anyway.</p><p>--</p><p>“501 has horses,” she mutters to herself, shaking her head as she finishes her check of trooper who’d long since passed out. She sighs, giving the order to send him on his way when he wakes up because there’s no need and no great urgency to do so now, and collects her helmet.</p><p>And there’s a moment when she feels like her heart stops, when she glances further in and spots a familiar head of red hair with a certain medic and she doesn’t know why. She joins them, dropping her helmet on her knees and drumming in time with her heart’s beating, picking up speed to make up for the missed beats, when she realizes it’s nothing major.</p><p>“Em,” Buck sends her a nod as he’s finishing his conversation with Dick and she nods back, giving him a smile that falls into pursed lips when he makes his exit. But she still doesn’t say anything until Dick leaves, half expecting something from him and though he acknowledges her, he doesn’t give her anything new. </p><p>“Could I be more useless?” She murmurs when he’s left and Gene gives her a look like he can’t quite believe that she’d say, much less think, something like that.</p><p>“You’re plenty useful,” he replies, reaching out a hand to pull her back to her feet, and she wants to sink into herself because she still doesn’t understand the spark that seems to electrify her very bones when his skin makes contact with hers. </p><p>And she thinks, briefly, as they leave the station together, that for two people who were so incredibly awkward and uncomfortable around one another they sure spent a lot of time together.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Nixon</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>And, yes, if you're wondering, I am face palming about how this reads as Blithe having died. Just adding to the saga, I guess.</p><p>No, the only way I can defend it is to say that just because she considers him as her first lost doesn't mean he actually died. And also, who knows what I was thinking when I wrote it.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>She’s half-heartedly listening to Nix and Harry, because she’s already trying to organize the files of her mind in preparation for the next step, when Blithe gets the concentrated bullet from a sniper’s rifle. She surrenders her hands to the wound quickly the moment they pull him back but she can’t do much good because she didn’t actually keep supplies, just lists, and now she was beginning to realize that that was probably her first mistake. Her second was not realizing that Doc had shown up in the first place, and though he never looked at her when he’d growled out orders for her to move and let him work, she’d still been taken aback. </p><p>--</p><p>Later, she holds her blood stained hands away from her body, staring at the farmhouse but in all actuality seeing Blithe’s eyes staring back at her and hearing the rumble of a Cajun dialect, livid with fury, in her ears.</p><p>“Hey, Ramos, been looking for you,” Nix states as he pulls up next to her, and she knows he’s there to tell her that they’re moving out and she spares a curious glance his way.</p><p>“Dick didn’t tell you?”</p><p>“Tell me what?” He asks, as she begins to fumble in her pockets, smearing Blithe’s blood permanently on her uniform, which she registers as something harrowingly poetic, though it’s gruesome and morbid, and later when she sees those stains she’ll remember him as her first loss and the idea of it will always sting and not just because of him but because of a medic from Louisiana.</p><p>“I’m staying here. There’s nothing for me in England,” she replies, coming up with a flask, which she tosses his way, adding, “Next time you want to smuggle Vat 69 with me, I’d appreciate it if you let me know first.” Nix is surprised she even had the flask, that she’d found it buried in her pack and that she’d kept it for him.</p><p>“That’s funny,” he takes a swig, comforted by the taste and the texture of the liquor as it snakes its way down his throat, “Thought I heard Speirs saying something about how Easy was your favorite.” Her brow creases as he says this, because she couldn’t imagine any situation in which he and Speirs would be interacting enough to have talked about her, because no one should be talking about her, anyway.</p><p>“I’m more useless on that island than I am in this country,” she states and he unexpectedly pulls her toward him and she naturally lets her head fall to his shoulder as they’re both staring at the farmhouse but he really has to go and she really should be finding another set of officers.</p><p>“I expect you to be right there waiting when I get back,” he says and she’s not sure if he’s joking or if it’s an order or if he just cares about her in all the ways that he shouldn’t. But whatever the case, he’s leaving and she’s staying and she still can’t quite see the farmhouse for the eyes and the voice that are overwhelming her senses.</p><p>--</p><p>“I don’t believe it,” Nix whistles, and she pulls at the reins, bringing herself and the horse around. She hadn’t even noticed him, she was too busy trying to bring all the faces to the forefront of her mind and she kept thinking she was seeing people she’d left behind and it was like there was some sort of barrier standing in between her and all of them, because she’d run off with another division for a while and everything was more muddled and murky than it was before she’d left. And if she was honest with herself, she never quite got past the voice in her ear and she hadn’t really slept in all the time since then.</p><p>“Nix,” she nods toward him and he thinks what an awful shame it was that she was here because her face had none of the feminine glow that it used to have and instead was coated with dirt and grime and even a scar or two and the hair that once was hidden away and tightly bundled was now loosely tied together but falling down over her shoulder and he couldn’t even be entirely sure that she was wearing the proper uniform because there were blood stains and dirt stains and rips and tears here and there and everywhere. But worst of all, she hadn’t even offered him any sort of smile.</p><p>“I hope they always shoot you in the head, your head’s too thick to penetrate,” she mutters, though, and he grins at her because she’s leaned over the horse to find the pocket on her leg and she’s got a flask again and he doesn’t have any idea how she manages that all the time. Her lips twitch, though she doesn’t exactly smile but she does roll her eyes because she hadn’t gotten to express her displeasure at him slipping it back into her pocket as they stood outside the farmhouse. Other officers she’d met weren’t as okay with her carrying around a flask of Vat 69, regardless of whether she drank it or not.</p><p>“You heard about that?” he takes the flask and it’s not long before he’s got a pile of papers, too.  “Where’d you get the horse?” The question makes her wince.</p><p>“Technically, it’s the property of any U.S. Army runner, so I did not steal it,” she answers, patting its neck because it was a pretty good ride and she didn’t think she’d made a wiser decision in all her life.</p><p>“Are you AWOL right now, Ramos?” He asks, eyeing her lanky, grimy frame that didn’t fit with the horse’s shiny, solid coat.</p><p>“Point me toward Dick?” She lifts her brow and Nix wants to pull her down from the horse because he’s sure he’d be a lot more imposing if she were shorter than he was, but instead he points her in the proper direction. “Besides, you’re the one who told me to be here when you got back.”</p><p>He can’t help but smirk as she gives the reins a tug and is off again.</p><p>--</p><p>“Hey,” he states, quietly, but she jerks awake anyway, silently cursing herself for falling asleep half bent over her knees because her body wasn’t what it used to be and she was exhausted in every way. She doesn’t notice until his hand touches her shoulder that he’s really there because she’d woken up to his voice so many times since the farmhouse that she just assumes it’s her mind playing tricks on itself though really she should have realized this time because the tone wasn’t angry but soft instead.</p><p>“Don’t you know everyone’s asleep?” she asks, and her voice is rough and not at all like he remembers, but though she’s war torn, the face is still the same one he sees in his mind standing on the airfield just before D-Day and something about that seems to make his hands a little steadier.</p><p>“Heard you were back,” he offers when silence has encased them again and she shakes her head.</p><p>“Think you got that backwards, Gene.” It’s more like a whisper than anything else because she doesn’t know how to reconcile the real Gene with the ferocity of the Gene inside her head.</p><p>“Yeah,” he looks up toward the open night as she looks down, her fingers curled into her helmet. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.” And here he wonders what could have happened to her between the time he’d seen her last and now that could make her the way she is and she thinks that, if anything, things had only gotten more uncomfortable but she’d take it over not seeing him at all because there was something about Eugene Roe that she couldn’t quite put her finger on.</p><p>“How’s the ankle?” He asks, and it takes her a minute to even register the question because she’s long since forgotten about the swelling and the constant dull ache of it.</p><p>“It’s just a sprain, Doc,” she replies, but they both know it’s not getting any better though she had genuinely tried what with stealing a horse and all.</p><p>“Even if you lie to yourself,” he begins, locking eyes with her for the first time, “Don’t lie to me.” And something about him in that moment lets her begin to reconcile the two Genes because, really, they were the same person and even if she was taken aback and haunted by one the other was still there.</p><p>For the first time in what feels like years she sleeps heavily, with the soft tones of his voice soothing her the whole time.</p><p>--</p><p>She spends most of her time in Dick’s room, so that’s she’s on hand whenever he needs something taken somewhere, and when she’s not there she’s roaming through the men, trying to re-familiarize the faces and learn the new ones, but, really, she spends a lot her time sitting with Doc, though neither of them talk to one another and eventually it seems she spends the whole of days with him because Dick’s gone to Paris and Nix is in England and there’s not much to do.</p><p>Gene doesn’t mind, though, because it lets him study her as she studies everyone that passes and at least this way she’s not running around and there’s no pressure on her ankle and he doesn’t know why he’s investing so much in her. All he knows is that sometimes, when the light is fading and the boys are disappearing from the streets, she’ll look at him and smile a sort of half smile like she’s not sure she’s doing it and he finds that he likes the way it looks on her.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Babe</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Okay, I promise I'm not going to add notes to every chapter, but it feels important to mention that apparently King Arthur (2004) had a pretty strong impact on me.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It isn’t much longer before they’re all freezing, sitting in fox holes, and surrounded by white and gray, like the world was devoid of color and all things vivid. And it isn’t long at all before Gene is running out of supplies and the whole company’s running out of everything and she feels like she’s traveling across the country, searching for something, anything to give any of them, all of them, a brief respite from the cold and the hunger and the pain. </p><p>She likes to stop by Dog Company, too, because for some reason she’d felt like she owed Speirs, so she’d brought him a pack of cigarettes and had been dropping by ever since even though the boys looked at her funny and they rarely said more than the beginnings of a conversation, always cutting off abruptly. But that was how they were, because she could read him and she was beginning to think that he was reading her.</p><p>Her favorite time of day, the times she remembers when she feels like she can’t go on, is when she finds Gene’s foxhole and he’s actually there and for some reason just sitting next to him can warm her more than stopping by HQ to see Colonel Sink.</p><p>--</p><p>“Hey, Ralph, you seen Gene?” she asks as she slips into the foxhole where Doc Spina sits with Babe under his arm. Spina shakes his head at her and she sighs, pulling herself further in the hole, sliding up next to Babe and offering a half smile his way, but he doesn’t smile back, he hardly looks her way. She bites her lip, which are a light shade of blue with the cold, wishing she was stuck in a hole with Gene and not watching this kid from Philly becoming overwhelmed with grief. But she was trying harder, these days, to keep herself in the moment.</p><p>“Babe,” she starts, but is interrupted by Gene sliding into the hole himself and she feels like there’s a weight coming off her shoulders because if anyone could fix everything that was wrong it was him. She digs her hand into Babe’s side to let her hand grasp his elbow after Doc’s given him chocolate and he and Spina start up a conversation.</p><p>She’d meant to leave again before morning, she’d only meant to find Gene for a moment, but she’d fallen asleep against Babe and when she woke the medics were gone. Babe offers her a smile, though, this time, and she can’t help but smile back at him, and let her head fall back against his shoulder. They’d hardly spoken to one another but the eyes they both had staring back at them were enough to give them the feeling of being kindred spirits in some odd way. It wasn’t like they had anything else in common, her skin was dark and his was fair and she was from Mississippi and he was from Pennsylvania and he was a soldier and she was just there to do paperwork. But somehow they fit.</p><p>“How long you been in love with Doc?” He asks, quite suddenly, and she thinks she should probably be surprised by the question but she doesn’t have the energy to pull her head from his shoulder again and so she doesn’t answer him at all but he keeps going, anyway. “He likes you, you know.”</p><p>“Yeah?” she questions, softly, because she doesn’t really believe any of it, but talking with Babe is like talking to her brother, in which all things were theoretical until he was ready to beat someone up. </p><p>“Yeah,” Babe pauses, looking down at her thin brown hair that flutters every now and again. And he doesn’t even mind the feel of it against his face. “You’re like a puppy, Ramos. Always following him around.”</p><p>“That’s not true,” she argues half heartedly, to which he laughs, and adds, “And it’s Emilie, Babe.”</p><p>“Sure, it’s true, Emilie,” he stresses her name and she smiles, tilting her head lightly to bury it against his sleeve. “Want to know how I know he likes you?” She shakes her head against his arm, but he answers his own question anyway, “Nobody wants a lame dog. But Gene likes you too much to put you out of your misery.”</p><p>“Babe,” she mutters against his sleeve, before finally looking up at him to see him wearing a grin and she vaguely thinks that at least she was good for something before smacking his arm. “Shut up.” </p><p>--</p><p>She’s sitting against the tire of the jeep that she was going to take back to the lines, her left hand shaking and bloody and as far away as she can get it, when Gene finds her. </p><p>“Ramos?” She doesn’t look up at him, she can’t look up at him, all she can see is Blithe staring back at her and all she knows is that her hand doesn’t feel quite right and she knows, somewhere in the back of her mind, that the town’s probably gone. He falls down beside her and takes her hand into his and she turns her head as the pain spasms across her face even as the electricity that Gene’s touch creates shoots up her arm.</p><p>“Emilie,” his other hand’s on her shoulder and his voice is pleading with her to look at him, “Come on. Em.” She feels that lurch in her stomach when she looks at him because she realizes that Babe was probably right. About her, anyway, she didn’t know about Gene.</p><p>“It’s goin’ to hurt, Em,” he says, his eyes locked on hers and she nods because she knew that anyway, she realizes, because some of her fingers were out of place and they needed to be popped back and there was bits of shrapnel and gravel stuck in it, too, and she knows because she was a bit of a nurse, too, because if she didn’t have multiple uses she never would have been here in the first place. She nods again as Gene’s still looking at her, and takes her tags in her right hand and scratches them against one another to prove that she’s still alive.</p><p>“Alrigh’?” he asks, because he’s been waiting to hear her voice and she’s been denying him the whole time and he felt like his heart was about to burst. Renee was dead. And he’d be damned if he was going to let anything else happen to the only other woman he felt like he’d cared about in the last few years. So he says her name again and he wants to pull her into him when she responds.</p><p>“Gene,” she starts, and he lets his focus drift back to her hand, “Gene. I’m sorry, Gene.” And with each touch of their hands on the others they let whispers of apologies pass back and forth.</p><p>“God,” she’s still holding her hand awkwardly, like it wasn’t meant to be there, but he’s finished and there’s nothing else he can do not in the least because the town’s all but gone anyway. “Gene. I’m sorry.” Her eyelids are fluttering shut in her exhaustion, as she leans against him because he’s taken her spot of leaning against the tire of her jeep. “Shit,” she mumbles.</p><p>“Em?” he’s finally pulled her against him for the first time and it feels good and he’s not quite sure why, just that his heart’s pounding and she’s alive and so‘s he and that was good enough for now.</p><p>“Shit, Gene, the hospital,” she’s just talking because she doesn’t know what else to do, because her heart’s still racing wildly and her hand feels strange and unconnected and painful, and his name on her lips is the best comfort she has in addition to being held firmly against his side. “That nurse. Damn it, Gene, I’m sorry.”</p><p>“Emilie,” he turns her head toward him when she makes no effort to do so herself, and it takes her a moment to focus her eyes and keep them open and really look at him and forget everything that’s happened and is happening around them. “It’s okay. You’re goin’ to be fine.”</p><p>“Shit, Gene,” she states again, unfocusing from his face and seeing the damage around them again, like she’s seeing it for the first time, because in a way she was, and she simultaneously sees those haunting blue eyes staring back at her, trying to breathe, trying to live, and there’s Gene pushing her hand out of the way. But no, this time he keeps it in his own and she sees him again, here in what’s left of Bastogne and she sighs his name on her breath one last time before letting her eyes shut and her head fall back against his chest. </p><p>“You’ll be fine, Em.” He buries his lips in her hair for a moment and then lets his breath dance across her ear. “We’ll be okay.”</p><p>--</p><p>“Hey, Em, don’t worry about it,” Babe gives her a look, sliding down next to her in her foxhole.</p><p>“Babe, my hand hurts like hell all the time and now they’re not even letting me do my job,” she grumbles, then looks at him. “But I can still freeze my ass off out here with my favorite company.”</p><p>“Yeah, I heard some rumor about you playing favorites,” he smiles at her. She sniffs, crossing her arms over her chest but the movement is awkward because she can’t bring herself to bury her left hand in her right arm.</p><p>“I should really never speak to Speirs again,” she sighs, watching her breath float away into the trees.</p><p>“Speirs?” Babe tilts his body so it’s facing her, the question clear in his eyes, because all the boys were gossips, really, there was nothing better to do, and, she thinks, maybe she shouldn’t have brought up Speirs at all.</p><p>“He’s an officer, Babe,” she states with a shake of the head. “I landed near him on D-Day. And I don’t know anything about the rumors. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t.”</p><p>“You really don’t know anything?” he asks, for clarity, and because he’s hoping for some new story to tell.</p><p>“Just that he likes to smoke,” she answers, and adds, before he can ask any more, “Yes, I’ve given him a few packs. There’s a story for you. We can blame it all on me. God knows it’s all my fault anyway.”</p><p>“Em,” Babe puts his arm around her and even though she’s irritated and frustrated with him and everyone else, she leans against him because he’s familiar and she needed a little familiarity in her life right now. “Honestly. Don’t worry about it. They’ll realize how much they need you before too long.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Dick</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It’s mass chaos when Hoobler accidentally shoots himself. She’d been talking to Buck, because she really didn’t know Dike all that well and that unnerved her because knowing the officers was her business. He’d turned to ask Lip about him and then there were shots and all hell broke loose. She’d jumped right in, because technically it was also her job, like she’d done by the farmhouse back before everything had changed.</p><p>This time, with everyone crowding around Gene hadn’t been quite so livid, but he still spoke with the authority that she’d always told him he had. She hadn’t noticed, but he’d eyed her hands, both trying to get closer to the wound, both working properly if somewhat awkwardly fumbling. He’d brushed her left hand away gently even as he hurried to see the problem and fix it. But he couldn’t see anything. And that panicked him.</p><p>“Gene,” she’d said softly, not expecting him to hear as they loaded Hoob onto the jeep. She’d go with them, anyway. It was the only job she could do. But Gene turned back to her for a moment.</p><p>“Stay here,” he stated, and let his fingers graze hers before getting in the jeep and disappearing into the haze.</p><p>--</p><p>She joined Nix and Dick at CP to write it up. Hoob’s dead and they’re down another and the numbers just weren’t large enough to do what they were being ordered to do and even sparing a glance at a map made her depressed in ways that she never knew she could be.</p><p>She happened to still be hanging around when a runner came with a letter for Nix and she couldn’t have been any more irritated because that was what she was supposed to be doing, but instead she was sitting in the middle of who knew where with papers scattered about her that didn’t really mean anything because they all said what they all knew – they had no supplies, they didn’t have enough numbers, and there was no foreseeable respite.</p><p>“Hey, Ramos,” Nix offers her a grin, though, “want to run up to HQ?”</p><p>“I could kiss you,” she states, taking the paper offered to her. And the echo of Nixon’s grin follows her all the way to town.</p><p>--</p><p>She was surprised to find HQ even more chaotic than the foxholes she’d left behind because it was hard to believe they were actually doing anything, being that Easy had just been sitting in the woods and she’d been there with them and had felt utterly useless so surely they had, too.</p><p>“Ramos.” There’s a growl in her ear, and she recognizes the Colonel’s voice instantly but she can’t help but roll her eyes when he adds, “Where the hell you been?”</p><p>“I had orders to stay put with Easy, sir,” she replies, not trying to cover her displeasure but simultaneously hoping he didn’t see. But he gives a humph in response, and she thinks maybe he didn’t realize and was as irritated as she was and that thought lets her lips quirk upward ever so slightly.</p><p>“Well, here,” he’s wandered back toward a desk, which she assumes is serving as his for the time being, and gives her a stack of papers and she purses her lips slightly at realizing that she was about to be serving as the mail call. It wasn’t that mail call couldn’t be a great thing; it was just that sometimes it just made everything and everyone all the worse for wear. She trades him the papers Nix handed over, though, and he looks it over with a nod, adding two sheets for Dick and Nix before sending her on her way.</p><p>--</p><p>She quickly quits the conversation between Sink, Dick, and Nix when Sink comes for a visit with a cameraman. She’d take information anywhere, but she typically wasn’t privy to it, regardless. So, she’s sitting with Doc, silently, as the boys meander through the grub line and Muck begins to point everyone out to one of the new faces, Webb, she thinks, though the name brings another face to her mind, and runs down the list in her mind with Muck’s voice, eyes closed, lips moving to create an echo with no sound.</p><p>But her eyes snap open when Bill and Lip have a joke of a conversation and she wants to smile, really smile for the first time since she’d been in England, but before it can even begin to grace her face she looks at Gene, sees him staring blankly ahead, and gives a sigh.</p><p>When he doesn’t even respond to the subtle touch of her hand on his, she inexplicably feels like crying, like she had on D-Day, and she doesn’t quite know what to do about it.</p><p>--</p><p>She doesn’t really know what to do with herself anymore, because Gene’s blanked out and she can hardly find Babe, and she’s losing good men faster than she gained them. So she spends most of her days running back and forth between Sink, and Dick and Nix, and the front line, always running down the list. That’s why, when Muck and Penkala get hit, it’s that much worse. Because she’d started to hear his voice, running down the list with the addition of wounds sustained, and no matter how hard she tries to have her own overpower it, it’s always there.</p><p>And so she stays away from all the boys when she runs down the list, because she’s tired of the voices and the faces that follow her everywhere and she doesn’t want to add any more to a different list that’s settled itself in the back of her mind that she technically wasn’t responsible for because she wrote it down and handed it in as it came, but more than that she is responsible and she jumps from name to name on a daily basis, every time she sees their face or hears their voice.</p><p>She has the unhappy misfortune of sitting with Dick when Lip gives his opinion of Dike. The thing is, everyone is in agreement, but there’s still nothing anyone can do about it. When Lipton’s left, she stands up to follow him out and thinks maybe she’ll head back to HQ and catch a ride with the Colonel on the way back.</p><p>“Em,” Dick calls her back, though, and she turns to lock her eyes with his. In his she sees a desperation, because he just wants to be with his company and he doesn’t want them to get hurt over the incompetence of an officer that no one wanted. But in hers he just sees an overwhelming, crippling sadness that takes him aback, like the list of the dead and missing was already growing longer, though nothing had happened yet. “Why don’t you check on Spina and Roe? See how they are on supplies.”</p><p>She knows how they are on supplies, and she doesn’t want to find either of them because it was too much to talk to anyone besides those she was certain enough would be safe, but she nods anyway because she does anything Dick asks. And she always will.</p><p>“Oh, and Em?” He draws her back one last time, only this time his eyes are soft and she can begin to see a bit of the sadness that she carries in hers reflected back in his. “Get some sleep.”</p><p>“Sir,” she whispers on an exhale, and turns out into the frigid night.</p><p>--</p><p>There’s something off about Speirs, when she sees him just before things get organized and Easy makes her way down into Foy. Something in his eyes and maybe even something in his voice when he tells her that she might’ve mixed up some mail and hands the letters back lets her know that whatever it is it can’t be good.</p><p>That’s why, after she’s read it and she’s watching the minuscule town, she can’t even feel the usual anxiety of what might happen to her boys and which lists might lengthen or shorten. She’s only aware of a fraction of Speirs’s attention being focused on her and it makes her unbelievably uncomfortable and she gets that feeling of not being able to breathe because he’s looking at her and so she’s immensely relieved when Dick calls him to replace the worthless officer down below and feels his focus stepping fully into being the leader that he was.</p><p>But she can’t yet breathe any easier, because she knows she has to ask.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Speirs</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Speirs tries to make it easier on her, finding his way to her in the midst of the celebration. He gets her attention easy enough, because she was staring blankly forward at an empty building, but he knew she was really listening intently to everything surrounding her and that’s why she reacts to the sniper before anyone else. There’s a moment, then, of chaos before Lip gets Shifty and they right the world again.</p><p>She slips away before he can get back to her. </p><p>--</p><p>There’s no more avoiding him at Rachamps. He finds her just outside the convent, where she’s looking up at the sky, instead of looking down at her fingers curling into her helmet like she usually would.</p><p>“Ramos,” he starts. And here, when she turns her attention back to him and away from the lengthy path her brain was running down, he quirks a brow at her with an offer of a cigarette. She waves him off because she doesn’t drink and she doesn’t smoke and surely he knew that by now. “Walk with me.”</p><p>“You know you’re down to sixty three?” she asks, and he’s somewhat surprised to hear the absolute sound of no emotion in her voice, though her words are angry when she adds, “Sixty fucking three.”</p><p>“Emilie,” he murmurs, and he would’ve stopped to look at her if he hadn’t been trying to make his way back to Battalion before it moved. “You can go home, you know.”</p><p>“It’s just two more to the list,” she says, and that’s answer enough. But she’s still walking beside him when they find Battalion and they both stop simultaneously because she still had a question and he was waiting for her to ask. She silently asks him to answer without her having to speak, but he stares her down because he knew a thing or two about grief and nothing she was doing really followed any pattern and that was reason enough to worry.</p><p>“Are you going to tell?” She finally relents, and he thinks she suddenly looks overwhelmingly childlike and innocent and he could understand why sometimes that medic seemed flustered when she was around and why Easy men were ready to throw punches when others made passing comments.</p><p>“That’s not up to me,” he replies, though he wants to say yes because he’s not sure where she stands and she’d be one less thing to think about. But, then, he also thinks he’d think about her anyway and at least this way he’d have her under his thumb. She knows, when she looks him in the eye, that he means it’s her choice, which makes sense because he’d  asked if she wanted to go home and she’d more or less said no, but she also knows that if she slips up he’ll be sending her home, regardless of her feelings.</p><p>Just before they part, her to the typewriter and him to the officers, she manages to conjure a pack of smokes for him. </p><p>“Just because you’re a damned magician don’t think that changes anything,” he offers as a parting warning and she actually laughs and he doesn’t know whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing.</p><p>But she thinks she can live with that.</p><p>--</p><p>She does a lot of running around in Haguenau. There’s always somewhere else to be, replacements, supplies, new orders, and she’s always looking for more. More Vat 69 for Nix, more cigarettes for everyone else. She feels like she hasn’t spoken to Gene in years and she feels like she doesn’t know how to anymore and so she takes the cowardly way out and asks Babe to be her go between for the few instances that she needs him. </p><p>Which is what she had been doing before she wandered up the street and found the new kid, Jones, wandering around.</p><p>“Delivery for you,” she states when she comes upon Speirs and Lip, and gives Speirs some paperwork, which he promptly passes on to Lipton, and Lip some pills. And here she notices Web, the first Web, the one she remembers more clearly. He nods her way and she closes her eyes for a moment to think because all this running around requires rethinking everything she does. </p><p>She’s never been more removed.</p><p>“Em,” Speirs draws her attention and she finally opens her eyes, which tell her that Dick and Nix were no longer in the room, though she’d sworn she heard their voices because even though she doesn’t look, she listens. “Would you stop for a second and just sleep?”</p><p>“What good am I asleep?” She questions, but it’s rhetorical, and soon she’s awkwardly leading Webster and Jones back to second platoon, because Speirs’s first guess, should he need her, would be there. And by the time they make it there, she realizes, that’s where she’d guess she’d be, too.</p><p>She’s so far out of the conversation that Babe’s pulling her down the stairs for cover, and when they all make for the showers, he leaves her there with the hope that her eyelids will finally close and she’ll take a moment off her feet.</p><p>--</p><p>She quite naturally finds herself stiff in the morning or the afternoon or whatever time it was, because she was probably dead wrong, and she limps her way toward the commotion to discover more casualties in her personal night. But before she can even begin to reorganize and rethink for the millionth time, there’s a whisper in her ear.</p><p>“Come see me when you can.” And she doesn’t let her breath go until he’s walked out and she looks down at the tags he’d pressed into her hand and for the first time she gives into having a few tear stains on her dirty cheeks.</p><p>“Hey, Em,” Babe pulls her against him because he’s happy to be alive, but also because he’s almost feeling like he felt when he left Julian to die alone and he’d seen the few tear drops falling from her eyes and they had this odd way about them when they were together. </p><p>“Oh, Babe,” she turns her face into his shoulder and shakes beneath his arm. And though she at least has herself mostly under control, they both find comfort in the embrace.</p><p>--</p><p>She never makes it to Gene, like he’d asked, or ordered, or told, or whatever. She’d found time to sleep again while they were moving, but she wakes to Web shouting to the passing German troops, blinking the sleep from her eyes and bringing her sleeve to wipe at her face.</p><p>“Horses are good,” she murmurs, and notices the small wet spot on Babe’s jacket. “Sorry.” He just smiles at her. And so she lets her head fall back on his shoulder.</p><p>--</p><p>In hind sight, she could see that this was a bad idea. Falling asleep on Babe, again. She knows, then, when she looks up and sees Gene’s face instead of Babe’s that she shouldn’t be surprised. So she’s not.</p><p>But she is somewhat baffled by the fact that she’s no longer moving.</p><p>“I told you to come see me,” he growls, and she understands now that that was an order, and he’s taken on that authority just like she’d told him he should. She thinks about giving him an excuse, about how she was busy or she had more important things, and she thinks about telling him the truth about how her heart was going haywire at that exact moment, but instead she tells him something else because she hasn’t told anyone and it was a bit ridiculous that Speirs was the only one who knew.</p><p>“My parents are dead,” she states, like it meant nothing. Because here on the other side of the world it did mean nothing. Just two more names to add to the list, she’d said. And she meant it.</p><p>“Emilie,” he softens for her, because he can still see her on the airfield, a windswept enigma waiting to unfold. </p><p>“I know, Gene, I know,” she says, staring forward, unseeing, but listening to him moving closer. “My ankle’s worse, it’s always worse, I know. I’ve begun to favor my right side more than a right handed person should, I know. And there’s something wrong with me, anyway, because I don’t pay attention anymore and I ignored your orders which I basically told you to give in the first place and I’m fairly certain Speirs is going to send me home before the war’s actually over. I know.”</p><p>“I can fix that,” Gene replies after she’s done. She doesn’t know what he means, because there’s no way he can fix all of that, even with his healing hands, until he’s standing in front of her with a fire in his eyes. He has to look into her eyes to be sure, because he’d never gotten as good at reading her as she was at reading everyone else, but that one look tells him all that he needs to know. <br/>So his hands bring her face to his and he pours every ounce of himself and whatever prayers for healing he has left into her. And she quite suddenly responds with an unexpected ferocity just before she breaks.</p><p>“God, Gene,” she whispers through the bone rattling pain and he pulls her against him and whispers nothing to her in French. She doesn’t know any language besides English, but she gets the message and she knows that he’s alternating between praying and speaking directly to her and she thinks she should feel like an intruder on this scene but she doesn’t, she realizes, because she’s part of it and she’s a part that belongs.</p><p>“I’ll fix it, Em.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. Harry</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>There’s only one time in Emilie Ramos’s entire life where she doubts Eugene Roe. Only one time, because she learns from her mistakes. But that one moment did well to throw her for a loop, and she never felt like she entirely recovered from it.</p><p>She couldn’t take the faces, so she stays away from the camp, only passing by when she knows that’s where an officer’ll be that she needs, but that’s rare after the first few days. So really she doesn’t see Gene, and that’s probably where the doubt came from in the first place. She doesn’t have a chance to realize that it’s there, anyway, because she’s still running to and fro, always favoring the right side because her ankle didn’t function properly and her hand was awkward and uncomfortable.</p><p>“Nix,” she grumbles one morning, because she was in a fairly constant state of irritation these days because everything she ran back and forth was rather pointless and she hadn’t seen Gene, and, she adds aloud, “I think I’ve finally run out.” She fumbles in her pockets, always on the right, and produces the flask one last time, filled with the last of it.</p><p>“Ramos,” he downs nearly half of it in one go, slipping it into one of his own pockets. “You’re a Godsend either way.” And here he buries his lips into her hair and for a moment she’s sorry that she doesn’t have more.</p><p>“Anyway,” she supplies, realizing after he’d moved back that he was waiting on information. “Dick’s looking for you.”</p><p>He laughs, so she smiles.</p><p>--</p><p>It isn’t until that evening that she understands she’s doubting his promise to her. Because it had been days since they’d shared any more than looks across desolation and sorrow and she doesn’t want to be selfish but she really does because she’s in love with Gene.</p><p>But she doesn’t really think anything’s going to come of it, whether he kissed her or not, she doubts him; until he finally finds her while she’s on her way to curl up with Babe because she can’t handle sleeping by herself anymore. Not after all the faces. But Gene spins her about and she’s burying herself in him instead of Babe.</p><p>“I’m sorry, Em,” he whispers against her skin and she shakes her head because she doesn’t believe there’s a single person in this world who is as astoundingly perfect as he is. So she tells him and he gives half a laugh and she finds that she likes the way it feels against her body and every bit of doubt she’d ever had about him vanished because here he was fixing her. Like he’d promised. She searches blindly for his hand and when she finds it she lets her fingers trace its outlines.</p><p>“I’m kind of in love with you, Eugene Roe,” she says the words directly into his heart and he separates their hands to coax her face to his.</p><p>“I know,” he states when they break, and she has the overwhelming desire to see whether her hand fits as perfectly around his jawline as she thinks it might. “I love you, Emilie.”</p><p>She lets her hand blend with his face and the shadows and he turns into it because it’s her left hand and she hasn’t realized but he has. She takes a moment to breathe in the moment deeply enough that she’ll remember it even when all her other memories fade before she suspends her lips just above his.</p><p>“Gene,” she whispers, and he leans closer so their lips are touching, “Go easy on me.”</p><p>--</p><p>“Hey, Babe,” she offers him a smile as the boys are gathering their things. He smiles back and it widens when his eyes flick behind her and she rolls her eyes because Gene’s hand is slipping into hers and Babe knows he was right back in that foxhole in Bastogne. “Shut up.”</p><p>“Doc,” he says instead, and Gene nods back with a mutter of “Heffron.”</p><p>“Em, I was thinking,” Gene starts, having pulled her around before she could join Babe. They’d made an unspoken agreement that they wouldn’t alter any of their normal patterns because they couldn’t be entirely certain what the night had meant and it’s not like there was any sort of precedent, or, at least, none that Emilie knew of. And it was her job to know. “I wouldn’t normally suggest stealing, but you should stay off your feet. There’s a barn just outside town.”</p><p>She smiles again, because just being around him gives her that free falling feeling and that itch just beneath her skin that tells her that somehow, spectacularly, she was kind of happy. And first and foremost on his mind was her and she’d never known that before. So she brings their entwined hands upward and lets her lips graze across his knuckles before turning away.</p><p>“Hey, Babe,” she echoes herself, and he looks back at them with a look in his eye because the boys were gossips. “Want to help me steal a horse?”</p><p>--</p><p>Sometime later, she finds herself sitting with Speirs, Nix, and Harry, staring out at the bluest sky she’d ever seen from Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest. And it strikes her as oddly poetic, VE-Day in an Eagle’s Nest. Dick trades Lip for Nix and she finds herself face to face with Harry instead.</p><p>“Ramos,” he lifts the bottle toward her, because Dick had turned him down, and she shakes her head, her hair shifting between falling over her shoulder and down her back as she does so. “If you don’t mind me asking, why are you up here?”</p><p>“First, Harry, call me Emilie,” she states, letting her eyes drift to Speirs and Lipton who’ve turned half their attention to her and Harry. “Second, what do you mean?” Because she doesn’t know what he could possibly be asking, as she spent the majority of her time with the officers, technically she was one, though she’d long forgotten and she figured the boys had, too, because her stripes where stained as much as the rest of her uniform.</p><p>“Sorry, Em,” he replies, already dropping the majority of her name like he’d called her that all the time. “I mean, why aren’t you with Doc Roe?” She feels a blush spreading across her face, and she thinks, for the first time since D-Day, she’d like to let her hair down. Really and truly down, to hide the blush across her face.</p><p>They’d been discrete, or, at least, she thought they’d been discrete. As far as she knew there wasn’t any one who knew except her and Gene and Babe, though he hadn’t come out and said it, so, she knew, he hadn’t actually told anyone else. But now it was out for most of Easy’s officers and all of Hitler’s ghosts.</p><p>“You know what I’ve always liked about you, Ramos?” Speirs interrupts before she can even begin to think of a proper answer. She lets her eyes shift toward him and discovers that he’s not looking at her anymore and for a moment the air between them is almost comfortable. “You’ve never needed to be told twice.”</p><p>He spares have a glance her direction and she can’t stop the childlike smile that lights her entire face before she disappears back into the house and back down the mountain.</p><p>He doesn’t let his own smile grace his face until her footsteps have faded, but Harry claps a hand on his shoulder and hands over the bottle.</p><p>--</p><p>“Em,” Babe’s voice entices her to spin from her short conversation with Shifty because she wanted to be able to say goodbye even before everyone knew, officially, that he was getting to go home. “Oh, sorry, I suppose I should be calling you Lieutenant Ramos.” </p><p>“Maybe you should, Private Heffron,” she replies, letting her hands sit on either side of her waist to further accentuate it. But when he pulls her against him she lifts herself on her toes to put her lips against his cheek.</p><p>“What was that for, Lieutenant?” He asks, and she thinks she sees a touch of red on his face and she finds satisfaction in discovering that she wasn’t the only one. She shrugs, pulling away from his reach and making her way to stand back to Speirs’s left.</p><p>“I just—thanks, Babe.”</p><p>--</p><p>“I heard there was a pretty Lieutenant trying to escape on a horse,” he calls, and she pulls the reins back around, letting the horse trot to a stop just in front of him.</p><p>“Not escaping,” she states, offering her hand to him, which gives him a slight thrill that he’s learned to associate with her. “I’m merely,” she pauses, “appreciating my freedom.” He shakes his head because she’s beautiful in ways that he can’t describe and when he takes her hand it’s to pull her down instead of helping himself up.</p><p>“I think,” he whispers, because they’re close enough that they blend together, “I could help with that.” He lets his lips dance across hers and she’s certain she can feel his soul. So she hopes he can feel hers, too.</p><p>“Your hands are beautiful, you know?” she says, because she’s got them both in her own hands and she’s struck with how lovely they really are and how unashamedly she enjoys the feel of them in hers. He looks down, away from her eyes when she says this and she can feel his mood shifting because he’s thinking through everyone he’s saved and everyone he hasn’t and she is, too, because she hasn’t been through the entirety of the list in weeks.</p><p>“Hey, Gene,” she murmurs, because she’s not ready to feel that way yet, and she’ll do her best to keep him from feeling that ever. “You called me pretty.”</p><p>“Of course I did,” he states, and she pulls her hand up to bring his eyes back to hers. He bites his lip and she silently tells that right now they should just be happy and he gives a subtle nod and they deplete the distance between them quickly. “You’re beautiful.”</p><p>For the first time, she’s aware that he’s nervous because he’s not in his element; he’s not using his hands. So she guides them to either side of her waist and lets her arms surround his shoulders.</p><p>And he knows just what to do from there.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0007"><h2>7. Gene</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It’s the day Dick tells them they’re going home that he finally breaks.</p><p>It felt like she’d been going nonstop because, it turns out, ending a war required a hell of a lot of communication. She’d passed on the news before promptly holing herself up to finally write down the lists in their entirety, to let them go by her lonesome.</p><p>She’s almost done when he comes back from the baseball game and something about seeing the tears drying on her face when he walks in and the lists on the table in front of her and his exhaustion from playing the game make him fall apart.</p><p>So she stands up to bury his face in the crook of her neck and he holds on for dear life while she runs one hand over his hair and the other grips his sleeve and they collapse together and give themselves over to their sorrow.</p><p>--</p><p>Later, when he’s recovered and so has she, he runs his hand through her hair as she traces images from her mind’s eye on his jawline. </p><p>“Gene,” she sighs, because they’re both exhausted and his eyes are half closed and hers are starting to, too. “Gene. I’ve gotta go home when this is all over. I’ve got to sort out everything with my,” she swallows, “my parents and all.”</p><p>“I’ll go with you,” he whispers, because he’s drifting off, still, but he knows he doesn’t want to be away from her. She sighs again and pulls herself closer to him, which makes him open his eyes. She’s buried her face, but he puts a hand under her chin and then lets his thumb brush over her cheek. “Em? I’ll go with you.”</p><p>“You can’t, Gene,” she murmurs, “You can’t. You’ve got to go home, too.” And then he buries her face against him again and he swallows in thought and sorrow and yearning because he knows she’s right because it’s been years and his own family deserves to see him. He brushes his lips against the crown of her head.</p><p>“Emilie,” he starts, but he doesn’t know where to go because he doesn’t want to say it aloud and he doesn’t want it to be true that he’s going to be without her.</p><p>“Gene,” she states, because saying his name is always the best comfort she has aside from being flush against him. “I’ll find you. When I’m done, I’ll find you.” She voluntarily turns her eyes toward his because she wants to be lost in them as long as she possibly can.</p><p>He swallows and dips his head down to place his forehead against hers. </p><p>“I’ve started a new list,” she’s ready to change the topic again because she doesn’t want her most recent memories of him to be sad when she’s alone in Mississippi. “It’s all the things I love about a certain medic in the 506th.”</p><p>He can’t help but let his lips twitch upward, but it’s almost as if there’s already a raging river in between them.</p><p>--</p><p>She gets off the train before he does because she’s staying in Mississippi and he’s going into Louisiana and it’ll be a week before they see one another again and that’s entirely too long and so he pulls her back by the wrist for one last, long, sweet kiss before she takes her leave. </p><p>But she watches the train pulling out of the station until it’s nothing more than a speck upon the horizon.</p><p>--</p><p>It’s too late, when she finally gets home. Too late for most of their things, too late for the house, and all she manages to get is a few heirlooms and a small sum of money and she does it all in her dress uniform and her combat gear because that’s all she has anymore. But she’d bought a dress for this afternoon, because she was meeting with some old friends.</p><p>She realizes, while she’s waiting by herself, a half empty glass in front of her, that she wasn’t home at all, that she didn’t want to be with anyone but him, that the Mississippi was separating them and that wasn’t right and it wasn’t fair and she really had somewhere else to be right now. </p><p>So she ignores the call of her name on the street and sets her sights on Louisiana.</p><p>That’s how she finds herself in another small café, because you “couldn’t miss it.” She’s a day early, so she’s nervous that she won’t find him until tomorrow anyway and she doesn’t know if her heart can take it. After being so close for so long, a week apart was hell on it.</p><p>“You’re early, ma’am.” She closes her eyes at the sound of his voice, but she can hear his breathing and the uncertainty that he always seemed to have like he didn’t know where he stood with her. But she’d be damned if he didn’t know after that moment.</p><p>“Someone must have forgotten to tell my date,” she finally replies. “I thought we made it clear, on that godforsaken island, that my name wasn’t ‘ma’am’.” He gives a short laugh, and she does, too, and they both drink it in because it sounds good together. And more than good, it sounds right.</p><p>“Emilie,” he starts, slowly, deliberately closing the distance between them. She reaches out to him with her left hand, finally doing it on purpose because she’s figured out how to use it properly and she wants him to know because it wouldn’t be working at all if it weren’t for him. He takes it and lets his fingers caress the knuckles, and she thinks she’ll never feel pain in them again because he had that effect on people. “I’ve started making a list, about a certain Lieutenant. And I’d like to run through it a few times to make sure it’s all there.” She laughs, fully, loudly, happily because she can. Because he’s here and she’s here and they’re here together and the war’s over and they never have to go back.</p><p>“Being thorough ‘s what got you the job, hm, Doc?” she asks, and she knows, when she looks at the spark in his eyes that he knows. He doesn’t have to question it anymore.</p><p>“You bet, Ramos,” he replies, bringing himself flush against her and letting his lips hover just over hers, “You bet.”</p><p>“Gene,” she starts, and he listens, and their lips start to trade their souls with one another. “Go easy on me.”</p>
  </div></div>
</body>
</html>